


Love and Anger

by megzseattle



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguments, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 22:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19260709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megzseattle/pseuds/megzseattle
Summary: After an intense argument, Crowley and Aziraphale go their separate ways for a few decades. Until, that is, Aziraphale finds a way to bridge the gap.(Inspired by If I Only Could, by eternal_song, who kindly gave her permission for me to continue her gorgeous story from 2017. Go read it. )





	Love and Anger

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [If I Only Could (I’d Make a Deal with God)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12338952) by [eternal_song](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternal_song/pseuds/eternal_song). 



> .
> 
> ## Previously, in part one
> 
> Crowley's last thought on leaving Aziraphale's shop:  
>  _I need to leave him be for a few decades, he thought to himself, or else we’ll both just be miserable._
> 
> His heart clenched, and though he knew that God didn’t make deals, he finally understood why mortals attempted it as part of their grieving process.

## Part 2

Aziraphale sat unmoving after Crowley left for the better part of three days. And then, just for good measure, he sat for another few hours. Just to be sure he’d thought enough. All that thought led him to two rather overwhelming conclusions.

One, he was … well, for lack of a better word, an utter ass. Full of prejudice, immensely judgmental to the ones – one, that is – he cared about most, hurting someone dear to him in the worst possible manner: without thought, casually and repeatedly, as if it didn’t matter at all. 

Two, he had pushed away his best friend, possibly for good. 

He already knew Crowley had left town. He could sense it, really, by the lack of something in the air. Now that the scales had been stripped from his eyes, he could ruefully admit that that something was probably love. A low-grade buzz of background love that had, in his experience, surrounded London for centuries and which Aziraphale had always assumed was just part of the psychic penumbra of the city. He remembered telling that to Crowley on occasion, and likely commenting on the demon’s inability to sense it. Imagine his chagrin to find out that, actually, this behind-the-scenes hum surrounding him was Crowley himself, loving Aziraphale, despite the fact that the angel truly didn’t deserve it. 

The silence now in its place seemed quite just. 

Aziraphale sighed and stood up, finally, on day four of his long dark night of the soul, determined. He was going to try to make this right, and he was going to have to wait patiently until Crowley was ready to deal with him again. 

He suspected he was in for rather a long wait. 

.

Aziraphale did, of course, check the Mayfair apartment, mostly out of habit. He knew before he got there that it was uninhabited, but he went regardless, unable to stop himself. As he’d suspected, it was empty and terribly quiet, the ceilings echoing with the habitual lack of furniture and with the lack of animation provided by its former inhabitant. 

Crowley had left his plants behind, though, which surprised him. He immediately miracled an endless water supply for them, then cancelled it in vexation at this easy answer to a problem. Better to water them himself, he thought, no matter how long. He’d consider it both a service to a friend he had woefully unappreciated and a part of his self-proclaimed penance. 

After a last, lingering look around, reassuring himself several times over that his friend had not left any kind of note or hint or personal item behind, he resigned himself to getting on with things and left, carefully locking the door behind him.* 

.  
2

Crowley didn’t saunter as he left the bookshop – he felt a bit like he might not have any saunter left in him. But he did get into the car with firm resolve and pull away without so much as a backwards glance. He could feel the grief he was leaving behind him, but it was overlaid with his own utter exhaustion and the disconcerting sense that something he’d been putting off for much too long had finally been attended to. Like the odd sense of pain mingled with relief you get when you pull out a diseased tooth, or finally get the splinter out that you’ve been chipping away at mindlessly for weeks. 

_And that’s enough thinking about Aziraphale for the time being_ , he thought sternly, conjuring up a box in his mind, locking their argument and subsequent parting inside of it, wrapping it with dozens of bristly straps and a smattering of hellfire, and stowing it away as far in his subconscious as he could. It continued to make its presence dimly known, but Crowley determinedly ignored it. 

He’d been in London much too long, Crowley decided, as he parked and covered the Bentley in long term storage before stopping home just long enough to glamour the plants into surviving without him. All tasks attended to, he turned his thoughts to warmer climates. Time to get away from this infernal English dampness for a while, spend some time basking somewhere warm.  


The south of Spain would do nicely for a start. 

.  
3

For the first year, Aziraphale tried to attend to his daily life but was always half listening for the bell at the front door. He kept the bookstore determinedly closed at most times, his heart no longer in the work in front of him, but he was always half hoping that his friend might return at any moment. He dutifully attended to Crowley’s plants twice a week, much to their delight, and often did a little dusting while he was there. Wouldn’t do to let the place go; Crowley could be back any time. 

After a couple of years had passed, he realized Crowley was likely not coming back anytime soon. He returned half-heartedly to the angelic deeds he’d been neglecting, tried hard to do good in the world as he was supposed to. He attended to the downtrodden, warmed the homeless, and gave hope to the hopeless as best he could. A tiny corner of his mind knew that he’d be all around better at this if he weren’t feeling quite so hopeless himself. Stories arose among the city’s downtrodden about the angel with the warm smile and sad eyes. No one knew him, not deeply. He was, in a word, ineffable. 

Ten years in, he began to wonder if Crowley was in fact still on the planet. Could he have carried out on his continual threats to run off to Alpha Centauri? It was possible, of course. Nonetheless, Aziraphale’s instinct told him that Crowley was out and about in the world, doing his best to forget about London and about him for the time being. They’d certainly been apart for longer in the past. They’d once not spoken for several years after Crowley spilled ink on a priceless first edition of Dante. A bitter argument in the 15th century separated them for almost a decade before one of them swallowed their pride. And this was, after all, the demon who had slept almost the entire 19th century away on a whim, much to Aziraphale's ire. Heaven knew nothing to compare to the stubbornness of his particular demon friend, especially when he was feeling crossed.

After second decade had gone by with no sign of Crowley’s return, he decided to try a slightly more direct approach. He dug out a lovely fountain pen and a piece of heavy, linen stock writing paper he'd commissioned at a local shop, and began drafting a letter, praying quietly for once to not get the words all wrong. A part of his old self queried tenuously whether it was correct for him to be praying for assistance with a demon. The new Aziraphale skewered that thought with the tip of his pen, held it up to the wick of the candle burning on his desk, and set it aflame. He took a grim pleasure in watching it metaphorically burn.  
.

 _My dear Crowley,_ he wrote, 

_I have simply no idea if this letter might reach you, or how, but I must share with you a few things that have been on my mind since you left._

_First, know that I am fully aware that every word you spoke to me on our last evening together was utterly true. I can deny not a word of it, and the weight of that realization has brought me no end of regret and remorse. It is not every day that one finds they have been prejudiced and cruel to their best and only friend, and for millennia, all the while hiding beneath a shining coat of self-righteousness that even Gabriel would find too garish and obvious. You tolerated it in silence for far too long, I’m quite aware. Bitter as the lesson was, I thank you for sharing the truth with me._

_My dear boy, apologies in this situation seem almost pointless, and yet I offer them to you, fully and whole heartedly, from the deepest part of my soul. I have been blind. My actions have forfeited millennia of friendship, and that seems fitting to the crimes I perpetrated against you, who has never been anything but kind to me._

_You have left for brighter shores and new horizons, I assume, and are undoubtedly having adventures despite what I suspect is a very deep wound of my making. I wish you happiness and joy, my friend, and hope that you are pleased wherever you find yourself and have found adequate interest and distraction from any thought of me._

_I know you owe me nothing more, but I do, indeed, hope that you might return someday. I would dearly love the chance to attempt to show you that I am, if not a changed angel, then one who is doing his best to learn and grow from these gravest of mistakes. Perhaps I could one day earn your friendship again, on a more equal footing, now that I have been made all too aware that the differences in our natures is indeed quite other than what I had assumed. The true difference is that you are much more loving and self-sacrificing of the two of us, and I am, it seems, a particular bastard in matters of the heart._

_I think of you often, with both intense regret and deepest affection._

_Your humbled and hopeful friend,_  
Aziraphale  
  
.

He read it several times, feeling it inadequate in every way, but too exhausted to do better, and then he performed a minor miracle to make himself 25 copies of it. He painstakingly addressed each to Mr. Anthony J. Crowley, in the care of the postmaster general of the major capitals of Europe, as well as a few key cities in North America he thought Crowley might have gravitated towards, and on sudden impulse, a few in Asia as well. It was, he was well aware, a long shot that any of the notes would reach him. On impulse he added a small angel wing charm to each envelope that would motivate their respective postmaster to look at it a little more closely before throwing it in the lost letter bin, and to encourage them to attempt to reunite the letter with its intended recipient. 

He delivered his bundle of envelopes to the post office, paid the rather astronomical postage fees to send them off via air mail all over the world, and then, feeling suddenly lighter in some way, stepped out into the street with a sense of almost peace for the first time in decades. 

Aziraphale squared his shoulders, brushed off his waist coat, and headed to Mayfair. He had plants to water, after all. 

.  
4

The first of the letters didn’t reach Crowley until nearly two additional years had passed, despite a rather bewildering display of effort from various post master generals around the continent who felt themselves oddly moved by these small, poorly addressed missives.** 

Crowley had spent most of the last twenty-seven years moving from place to place. He spent a few years in the south of Spain, where he did his best to avoid all other living creatures and rented a small house on an inaccessible beach where he let out his inner snake and basked on a sunny rock most of the day, trying to burn his mind and soul clean of anything but heat. He spent the first year mostly grieving, if he were being honest with himself. He spent the next half a decade mostly being very, very angry. And then, well, he tried to move on. 

Needing something more to do, he moved on to Greece, where he spent his time excavating some of the former ruins of Delphi (and keeping the best bits for himself), and also fomenting minor acts of discord in the local populace. When that grew tiresome he tried Sweden, but although the fjords were beautiful and the people amenable to his persuasions, his essential snake-like nature made it much too cold for him. He spent a few quick months in Denmark in the summer, trying to understand (and honestly undermine) whatever it was that made it the happiest country in the world, to little effect. Perhaps his heart just wasn’t in the task. Then, eyeing another period of retirement from the wiles trade, he undertook an extensive survey of the social mores and customs, island by island, of the Indonesian archipelago, which, with over 18,000 islands to visit took quite some time and proved a wonderful distraction from thoughts of home. 

He ended up, as most demons inevitably do, in Rome. ***

Rome, Crowley thought, was nearly ruined by the fact that on the average day there were more demons in town than priests, but its charms somewhat made up for the fact that one was always running into a colleague one didn’t really care for at every turn. He was basking on the small, sunny patio of his apartment just outside the walls of Vatican City when one of the local boys who ran errands for him called out from below. 

“Signore Crowley?” 

Crowley unfolded himself from his lounge chair reluctantly and leaned out over the metal railing to meet the eyes of the boy in the street. 

“Yesssss?” he hissed. “What is it?” 

The boy waved an envelope at him. “You have a letter.” 

“Who’s it from?” he muttered, annoyed at the interruption to what had been a very nice day.

“Dunno, sir, but the postmaster paid me ten euro to find you.”

Crowley gestured that the boy should wait and sauntered down to the street. 

As soon as he touched it, he just knew. It was like being hit by a spark. And if that hadn’t given it away, the fussy, ostentatious stationery was a dead give away as well. He peered at the envelope a little more closely. Was that a wing embossed in the top left corner? And how on earth did this reach him with only his name and no address? 

Crowley swallowed a quick panic and threw the envelope hurriedly at the kitchen table as if it might explode in his hand. He stared at it suspiciously for a few more minutes, and then, coming to a decision, decided to cede the house to it and go drink elsewhere until he was nearly blind. 

Another nice thing about Rome, he noted in the process, is that when one wants to get blindingly drunk in the early afternoon, there are always a variety of lovely choices of venue in which to do so. He chose a lovely little osteria where the owners knew him and afforded him silent respect; he knew he could sit and sip vin santo until his eyes began to cross with no interference from anyone. 

He proceeded to do exactly that. 

Crowley was a little startled when he got home very late that evening to find the letter still there. He experimented with miracling it away for a moment, then miracled it back in a cold sweat, afraid he had lost it in the ether. Then in a fit of anger at himself for being so indecisive, he ripped the envelope and its contents to shreds, unread. He later felt guilty about that, and quickly miracled it back to its original state. Finally, disgusted with himself, he stomped off to bed. A nap would help. 

When he woke up a week later, feeling somewhat refreshed, the letter was still there. 

Suppressing the urge to let his hand tremble a tiny bit – demons did not tremble, trembling was for plants and mortals and, well, plants -- he made himself a very strong espresso and sat down to read it. 

.  
5

On the third day of the third month of the twenty eighth year of their separation, Aziraphale was waist deep in a large wooden crate full of wood shavings and packing foam and books – oh lovely, ancient books that he’d sent for from his sources in Turkey. He was carefully wiping off the cover of an old medical text that looked rather exciting when the front bell tinkled quietly behind him. 

“We’re closed,” he called back over his shoulder distractedly. “Do go away!”

Then, it hit him like a dash of ice up the spine – they _were_ closed and the door was _not_ , in fact, unlocked. There was only one other person who was able to enter his shop at will. Aziraphele froze, elated by the possibility and utterly terrified to turn around and find it wasn’t true. He made a quick and arcane gesture and prayed as hard as he ever had, for just a moment. 

“Hello, angel,” Crowley said quietly. “Got your letter.” 

The angel spun around, suddenly unaware of the crate and his surrounds and anything except that the fact that it was _him_ , it was really him, standing right here in the shop. Crowley. Still dressed in black, hair tied back, a bit more tanned than Aziraphale remembered, perhaps. He stood with his hands in his rather tight pockets, dark glasses firmly in place. He wasn’t smiling as such, more of a studied neutral expression on his face, and his posture was alert and watchful, and he was utterly, without question the best thing Aziraphale had seen in years. 

“Crowley,” he breathed in wonder. 

They locked eyes for a moment, and in spite of anything else he might be feeling, Aziraphele felt the most enormous, idiotic, beaming smile break across his face. He made an effort to control it, fearing it might be unseemly given the circumstances of their parting, but no matter what he did, the same smile just kept bursting out, bright enough to dim the sunlight in the windows. “I- I know I should be something other than this – “ he gestured futilely at his face – “but oh, Crowley. It is _lovely_ to see you.” 

Crowley waited a beat, maybe two, and then the slightest hint of a smile crooked up one side of his mouth too. It appeared to be genuine. 

“Angel,” he said, “let’s have lunch.”

Aziraphale couldn’t think of anything he’d more like to do in that moment in the entire universe. 

.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.  
.

FOOTNOTES:  
* If he noticed the plants cheering at the prospect of a long vacation with Uncle Aziraphale as their guardian, he did not comment on it. 

** Over time, legends would build up around them – the angel letters, that filled those who held them with such a sense of love and loss. A few postmasters, unable to deliver them, ended up taking them home and enshrining them. One or two ended up in antique shops as part of a display of ephemera. One of them inspired a novel, followed by a ridiculous and saccharine television movie that utterly missed the point and which Crowley would never, ever, ever let him live down. 

***Theologians, Crowley believed, would do better to lay aside the eternal question of how many demons could dance on the head of a pin and instead query their peers about how many angels could dance on the roof of St. Peters. There are nearly always at least a dozen up there.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on tumblr at https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ineffably-good


End file.
